About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Thursday, August 31, 2017

The report focused on many individual rescue stories,
especially with the “Cajun Navy”, and showed that I-10 east of Houston had
become part of the Gulf. While it showed many scenes in public building
shelters (I wondered about Minute Maid Park), it did not get into the subject
of how people will be housed after the water recede.

ABC and Disney have declared Aug. 31 as a “Day of Giving”. You can consider eating out art participating
restaurants in almost any city.

Monday, August 21, 2017

President Trump proposed a pragmatic strategy In Afghanistan
in his speech from Fort Meyer, VA, Henderson Hall, tonight, in a half-hour
address. He said that he would not
announced an end date to any strategy and that any plan would be results-based,
not time-based, because an enemy can simply wait us out. The main CNN story
is here. He seemed to read the speech from a teleprompter.

Trump made an appeal to distributed consciousness: a wound on one is wound on all of us. It doesn't seem to apply to him.

His approach is called "principled realism".

Then CNN presented a Town Hall with House Speaker Paul
Ryan.

Ryan was quite emphatic in denouncing neo-Nazis and white
supremacists as particularly dangerous enemies, especially of
African-Americans, and said the President messed up a couple times in handling
this issue.

Later Ryan defended the idea of replacing Obamacare with a
system that singled out high risk pools for special subsidies. CNN coverage here.

Ryan talked about the beneficial effect of Foxconn on his own home community in Wisconsin.

Ryan said that the recent progress of North Korea toward miniaturized nuclear warheads on ICBM's could create a grave threat to the U.S.

Friday, August 18, 2017

ABC 20-20 aired “Fractured America” tonight, with portrayals
of the most extreme domestic movements on the right and the left, from White
Supremacists, to ANTIFA (Anti-Fascists).

It started out by covering a female demonstrator (Lacey
MacCauley) from ANITA leadership whose speech was rather metaphoric, to
covering the demonstrations on Inauguration Day. It moves to the violence at
Berkeley when Milo Yiannopoulos appears.

It switches to covering Heimbach, and then Richard
Spencer. Listen to some of the quotes:

“Equality is for losers”.
“We want to march like ants in formation.”

The documentary moves to covering a gathering in Pikeville,
KY (which I visited in May 1972 when looking at strip mining).

The documentary covers the eruption of violence Saturday
morning in Charlottesville, VA leading to a car attack resulting in one death,
and then it cover’s Trump’s “blame both sides” flips.

Finally it tries to sit MacCauley down next to Spencer. There was a discussion about a “white homeland”
v. “anarchist utopia.” and then the need for self-defense. OK words are not bullets. It’s impossible to summarize any logic that
makes sense.

The broadcast emphasizes that most political demonstrators
are non-violent.

What seems most at issue is the “right” of people who claim
systemic group oppression not only to use force to defend themselves, but to
compel others to support them preferentially in order for them to achieve their
collective goal. The White Supremacists
started Charlottesville, and intended Antifa to combat them, which
happened. But Antifa , whatever its own
wrongdoing, seems to have a lot of public support for its clam that it can
expect society to regard white supremacy as the greater evil first. Sometimes social change does require some
physical altercation. Look at Stonewall.

Saturday, August 12, 2017

An episode of Dateline, aired Friday, Aug. 11, 2017, “Diabolical”,
is important because it shows a someone being framed for a computer crime. The link for watching is here.

In Los Angeles, the wife of a US marshall sent emails to
herself and made them look like they came from a romantic rival with spoofing
software. The rivalry was complicated by
condo mortgage problems, The rival was arrested in kept in jail for three months
(with bad food) before a good lawyer figured this out. The Los Angeles Times has the story.

This has been called the “ultimate identity theft” or “reflexive
catfish”.

The incident was also connected to bizarre video games involving fake rapes.

Tuesday, August 08, 2017

Monday night, at 10 PM, PBS previewed Ken Burn’s film “The
Vietnam War”, with the preview video here. The video was often interrupted with lengthy
requests for donations.

The main link for the series is this and it starts September 17,. The most interesting part from my perspective is likely to
be the issue around the draft, deferments, Basic Training, people trying to “get
out of things” by enlisting NG, and so on.

YouTube offers a 53-minute interview with Ken Burns from the
LBJ Library in Texas.

Monday, August 07, 2017

“Why Trump Won”, Fareed Zakaria’s documentary film (one
hour) just aired tonight, Monday, Aug. 7, 2017 on CNN (it had been originally
scheduled for July 31), best link here.

Zakaria had predicted on Oct. 16, “let me be clear, Trump
will lose.” And he was wrong.

But in hindsight it is easy to understand that white working
class Americans who had been displaced by elitist shareholder capitalism, which
was gradually moving toward the “elitist” Democratic Party with its new rainbow
concept of diversity. The epicenter of
the base was perhaps Trumbull County Ohio, SE of Cleveland, among the hardest
hit by the plant closings. The job implosion
led to a gradual decline in the social fabric rather parallel to the inner
cities, but to a whiter population.

Yet Trump, by ignoring all the rules of the game, beat out
16 candidates in the Republican Party and survived gaffes, including a display
of his heterosexual fantasies to Access Hollywood; his base voted only for their own immediate
interest, not for the good of the “country” or especially the “world”. So we had America First. Even science was
elitist. Projections about what could
happen to future generations were elitist.

Sunday, August 06, 2017

NBC Dateline “Infatuation”
(link ) presented the mystery of the stabbing of
Samantha Nance in a bizarre love
triangle (or rectangle). The Dallas News has the fact history.

Daniel Willyam would be convicted largely by circumstantial
evidence for a stabbing that took place in a typical Dallas garden apartment
complex. Samantha had a slender
boyfriend who also was a student at the Dallas Institute for the Arts. The
other boyfriend had an unusual collection of trophy weapons, but turned out to
have a firm alibi at the school despite the convicted suspect’s attempt to
frame him. Willyam apparent had a gay crush
on the other boyfriend and felt “left out” socially.

The suspect had shown anger management and jealousy problems
in the Navy, and perhaps “upward affiliation”.
The case is very much an aberration in the history of former gay
servicemembers and “don’t ask don’t tell”.

You need your own track in life to avoid these kinds of
emotional traps.

Saturday, August 05, 2017

ABC 20-20 aired a report “Can Words Kill: Death by Text”
Friday night, about the suicide of Conrad Roy by carbon monoxide in his car, as
he was receiving text messages from a former girl friend Michele Carter.

She was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in a bench
trial by a Massachusetts Judge.

The case breaks through legal boundaries of whether
encouraging someone to commit suicide by texts or social media is actually a
crime.

It could one day have some implications in the downstream
liability issues, where Section 230 is already under threat of erosion over the
Backpage scandal. ‘

But the case is also disturbing because Conrad seemed to
develop mental illness in his late teens, despite being a good athlete and
student (July 16).

CBS 48 Hours aired a
similar show with Katie Couric called “Death by Text”.

Friday, August 04, 2017

“Salvation”, on CBS, is a somewhat hyped series about how the
US deals with an asteroid threatening Earth.

Liam Cole is the 20-year-old MIT student played by British
actor Charlie Rowe, who discovers the asteroid shortly after the government
does. Clean cut and charismatic, Charlies finds himself in a bizarre political
struggle where his own professor wants him to cross over to the Russians, who
seem to be competing for the solution. The story become a reflection about today’s
ideas of power and oligarchy and money as becoming more important than
survival.

Erica Luttrell is girl friend Claire.

There are eight episodes, packed into six Wednesday evenings
July 12 through August 16.

Update: Sept. 10

On Aug. 30, the president collapses dead as she is about to tell the nation. Apparently the Russians poisoned her. So the public doesn't now yet.

Update: Sept. 21

The season finale "The Plot Against America" sees the return of the female president MacKenzie. and a NORAD warning of a Russian nuclear attack. The "good people" will live on an orbiting space station for 2 years until Earth recovers. But Liam, in the very last scene, announces a discovery that could change everything, a glimmer of hope.

Liam is turning out to be a kind of Messiah, the perfect kid that every parent wants. Does this fit our preconceived fantasies of what superheroes should be like? White, cis male, both geeky and reasonably athletic, and perfect to look at. Someone gay men and straight women want in bed.

Sounds like there may be a season 2, and it might start on the space station and return to Earth. I claim that idea.

Wednesday, August 02, 2017

Tuesday night, August 1, 2017, CNN hosted a town hall “Climate Change Crisis: Time to Act” with Al Gore, whose second film “An Inconvenient
D=Sequel: Truth to Power” opened recently, after his groundbreaking “An
Inconvenient Truth” opened in 2005.

Gore answered several people who had lost homes to floods in
Louisiana, after unprecedented rains, or to wildfires. People did not have flood insurance because
massive events like these had not happened in the area before.

Gore said that big storms may not be more frequent, but when
they come they will be more destructive because they have more heat and
moisture to work with.

Gore also said that on all social issues, there is always
denial and popular resistance, until a new generation wakes up to the idea that
you just have to recognize right and wrong and to the right thing. He said the
same thinking had applied to civil rights and gay rights, including marriage
equality.

Tuesday, August 01, 2017

I have to express some snark at the stories of hackers
stealing HBO’s “Game of Thrones” content and threatening to release it, as
Grant Rinder reports on Vox. Apparent the threat includes leaking screenplay
scripts.

Previously there had been an incident with Netflix’s “Orange
Is the New Black”.

Right now, I discuss my own screenplays and novel plots on a
Wordpress blog, because no one perceives any “ratings” value. It all seems rather silly. In fact, there is a “third party” rule in
Hollywood that doesn’t even allow studios to look at a logline, let alone a
script, without an agent,, out of fear of accidental copyright infringement,
given the obsession with audience volume with bean counters for the more
popular shows and movies.

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